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Meg and Alice, Tale V., and Isabella, Tale VI., of
Shakspeare's Heroines. By Mary Cowden Clarke.
Conquest of Florida by Hernando de Soto. By Theo- edited by R. S. Houghton, M. D. Fowler & Wells,
dore Irving, Μ. Α.

The LIVING AGE is published every Saturday, by E. LITTELL & Co., at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets, Boston. Price 12 cents a number, or six dollars a year in advance. Remittances for any period will be thankfully received and promptly attended to.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE. - No. 379.-23 AUGUST, 1851.

What propitious genius could shower down a His childhood proved to the highest degree susgreater confluence of gifts and influences than ceptible of such influences: as his brother saysseemed to surround this child of promise? A "By nature as well as circumstances he was the father whose rare depth of thought was equalled poet-child of a poet-father." The first anecdote of only by his matchless powers of expression-the his conscious babyhood does justice to his high eloquent philosopher pouring out benedictions on lineage. When he was first taken to London, his first-born-that father's friend the poet of the being then a child in arms, and saw the lamps, he age, and a poet for all ages, drawing inspiration from exclaimed, "Oh! now I know what the stars are; the wonderful child, and giving it back in prophecy; a life passed amid the fairest and grandest scenes of nature, far removed from all rude and vulgar associations; and in the child himself a vivid fancy, a keen thoughtfulness, a premature intelligence, hereditary genius, and a heart to love and feel all pure and holy things. What fairshining, fruitful, long hours of day, what splendors of sun-setting, might not be foretold from so glorious a morning, which yet was obscured by an

they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up into heaven."

Hartley was four years old when his father removed from the south to Cumberland. Greta Hall, well known as the residence of Robert Southey, was then building by Mr. Jackson, of whom mention is made in Southey's life. It was originally planned that Coleridge should share this house with him-an arrangement which had a great influence on Hartley's childhood, for when

uglier "cloud," a baser " rack," than the poet could his father's health obliged him to leave the north, have dreamed of when he sadly pictured degrada- and Southey took his friend's place at Greta Hall,

tion! Let no one covet for his darling an exemption from the world's common lot of trials-a hothouse cultivation, a shelter from rude winds and the season's inclemency;-too many immunities from the every-day lot are worse than too few. What was it in the end that this child's life was ushered in by sonnets and fair auguries; that his infant cries were hushed in moonbeams, by nightingale's songs; that his gambols were watched by admiring genius interpreting them into deepest and purest poetry; that wise men pondered over his childish sayings, and speculated on the philosophy in his mysterious doubts and perplexities; that even his dreams were chronicled; and all this not in the inferior vanity which exults in a prodigy, but from motives which have made the observations and deductions really profitable and important? But it is time to turn from generalities to the subject of our memoir-from regrets at the fall from what might have been, to the picture set before us of what was.

Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was born at Clevedon, on the Bristol Channel, on the 19th September, 1796.

The singularity of his appearance, by which he was distinguished through life, and which, together with the shortness of his stature, (possibly attributable in some measure to his premature birth,) had a marked influence upon the formation of his character, was apparent from the first, though he grew up to be a pretty and engaging child. His father, in the exquisite poem, entitled "Frost at Midnight," addresses him as his "Babe so beautiful."

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My Babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look on thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely, but the sky and stars.
But thou, my Babe, shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags; so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in Himself.
Great universal Teacher! He shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

the child was left under the same roof with his gifted uncle, and in the direct charge of Mr. Jackson and his housekeeper, who had become devotedly attached to him, and we may infer, spoiled him by "unlimited indulgence." That he was a remarkable child at this time, filling those who watched him with mingled love and hope and fear-any thoughts, in fact, but plans of commonplace discipline and good management-we may learn from the beautiful lines of Wordsworth, not too celebrated or well known to have a place when their subject himself is before us.

To brood on air than on an earthly stream;
Suspended on a stream as clear as sky,

Where earth and heaven do make one imagery;
O blessed Vision! happy Child !
Thou art so exquisitely wild,

I think of thee with many fears

For what may be thy lot in future years.

I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,
Lord of thy house and hospitality;

And Grief, uneasy lover! never rest,
But when she sat within the touch of thee.
O too industrious folly!

O vain and causeless melancholy!
Nature will either end thee quite;

Or, lengthening out thy season of delight,
Preserve for thee, by individual right,

A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks.
What hast to do with sorrow,

Or, the injuries of to-morrow?

Thou art a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Ill fitted to sustain unkindly shocks,

Or to be trailed along the soiling earth;
A gem that glitters while it lives,
And no fore-warning gives;

But at the touch of wrong, without a strife
Slips in a moment out of life. - Wordsworth.

These lines seem to have had an almost haunting effect on those who watched the after life of this fairy voyager;" as they saw how the character of his childhood never left him, and what was enchanting in infancy grew into something strange and mis-shapen from being retained beyond the fresh period of unthinking infancy. For every- | cation between good and evil, and make a debatething is beautiful in his time, and childhood cannot able ground of palliations, affinities, excuses, and be protracted into youth, (except in the innocence detractions, obscuring the path which seemed at a which characterizes it;) its purposeless, wander- distance so clear; as natural philosophers lose their

ing, merely impulsive being cannot be retained beyond the natural term, without implying some weakness, either in the will or the constitution of the mind. What Hartley's singular powers of mind were at this time, we learn from an extract from Mr. Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary.

Afterwards stepped to Charles Lamb's. Coleridge there. A short but interesting conversation on German metaphysics. C. related some curious anecdotes of his son Hartley, whom he represented to be a most remarkable child, a deep thinker in his infancy. He tormented himself in his attempts to solve the problems that would equally torment the full-grown man, if the world and its cares and pleasures did not distract his attention. Hartley, when about five years old, was asked a question about himself being called Hartley. "Which Hartley?" asked the boy. "Why! is there

disgust for what is revolting to the uneducated senses, in their skill in resolving every hateful sight of decomposition, each evil odor, to the chemical elements of which it is composed. It is well that we should learn to love what is cleanly, and hate what is foul and impure, before we attain knowledge, good and true in itself, but neither good nor true to us, if it interferes with our dis tinct appreciation of cleanliness and impurity, or abates one tittle of our love and abhorrence for

these antagonistic qualities. The habit, as an exercise of the understanding, did not grow upon him; his childhood and boyhood were rather distinguished by fancy and invention; such invention, that is, as a child is capable of, which is more a rapid adaptation of all newly-acquired knowledge to his purpose than anything really original; a more than one Hartley?" "Yes," he replied, talent only remarkable in the degree in which he "there's a deal of Hartleys." "How so?" possessed it, in the hold it had over him, to the "There's Picture-Hartley," (Haslett had painted a literal confusion to his own mind between fact and portrait of him,) "and Shadow-Hartley, and there's fiction, and, above all, in the power he possessed Echo-Hartley, and there's Catch-me-fast-Hartley;" of conveying his dreams to others in clear, animated at the same time seizing his own arm with the other

hand very eagerly, an action which shows that his mind must have been drawn to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery, viz., that a man should be both his own subject and object, and

that these two should be one.

At the same early age, continued Coleridge, Hartley used to be in agony of thought, puzzling himself about the reality of existence. As when some one said to him "It is not now; but it is to be." "But," said he, "if it is to be, it is." Perhaps this confusion of thought lay not merely in the imperfection of language. Hartley, when a child, had no pleasure in things; they made no impression on him till they had undergone a process in his mind, and were become thoughts or feelings.-Memoir, p. xxvii.

language. We will not suspect our readers of forgetting their own childhood so far, or suppose it to have been so dull and uninspired, as to apologize for introducing them to the fairy land of this young genius, as recorded by his brother, and thus giving each one an opportunity of comparing it with his own.

The autumn of the year, (1807, when Hartley was ten or eleven years old,) he spent at Bristol with his maternal grandmother, where he joined his mother, his little sister, and myself. It is now that my own recollections of my brother begin to be distinct and continuous. From this time for the next eight years -how large a portion of those first twenty years, which have been truly said to constitute a full half of the longest life ! - I was his constant companion at home and at school, at work and at play, if he could ever have been said to have played; by day and by night we read together, talked together, slept together. Thus I became the depositary of all his thoughts and feelings, and in particular of that strange dream of life, which, as above mentioned, he led in the cloud land of his fancy. It will not be thought strange if I linger over this period, the most remarkable, and, as it proved, by far the happiest of his mortal existence; nor, considering the object of this narrative, do I think an apology necessary for the following details. Ata very early period of his childhood, of which he had himself a distinct though visionary remembrance, he imagined himself to foresee a time when, in a field that lay close to the house in which he lived, a small cataract would burst forth, to which he gave the name of Jug-force. The banks of the stream thus created soon became populous-a region-a realm; and, as the vision spread in ever-widening circles, it soon overflowed as it were the narrow spot in which it was originally generated, and Jugforcia, disguised under the less familiar appellation of Ejuxria, became an island continent, with its own attendant isles-a new

As Mr. Coleridge says, the tendency to metaphysical inquiry is common in children. Most of us probably can remember when the mysteries of our being before we had, as it were, got used to existence, and new things were continually presenting themselves to our mind-perplexed us much more than they do now, when we take wonderful things as a matter of course; but also this child was placed very much in circumstances to encourage this habit of thought. What are called hereditary tendencies are as often derived after our birth, through the simple agency of the senses, as by the more subtle influence which is generally understood by the expression; and seeds of certain trains of thought may be, and probably often are, laid at an age too early for those that plant them to have any idea of what they are doing. The conversation that would greet Hartley's infant ears would be of a metaphysical character, and he might catch the knack of it long before he could follow in any direct sense the meaning of the words spoken. Possibly it may not be well for children to hear much deep talk, if, that is, they have any turn for understanding it, for in most instances there is a native healthful power of resistance and rejection of what is hard and crabbed, which protects from this danger. It needs a mature mind, and a will and principles confirmed and strengthened by direct precept and simple uninquiring faith, to stand the shock of metaphysics, that analyzing of facts and principles and motives, which seems space of long years he went on evolving the compliso often to remove the hard, strong lines of demarcated drama of existence. There were many nations,

Australia, or newest Sea-land-if it were not rather
a reflection of old Europe projected from the clouds on
some wide ocean somewhere.
Taken as 2

***

whole, the Ejuxrian world presented a complete anal

ogon to the world of fact, so far as it was known to Hartley, complete in all its parts: furnishing a theatre and scene of action, with dramatis persone and suitable machinery, in which day after day for the

continental and insular, each with its separate history, trophe, applied to his father, who excited his indignacivil, ecclesiastical, and literary; its forms of religion tion by treating the matter too lightly, when he said and government, and specific national character. "he should inform the public that the only bad lines

**

When at length a sense of unreality was forced upon him, and he felt himself obliged to account for his knowledge of and connection with this distant land, he had a story (borrowed from the "Arabian Nights") of a great bird, by which he was transported to and fro. But he recurred to these explanations with reluctance, and got out of them as quickly as possible. Once I asked him how it came that his absence on these occasions was not observed, but he was angry and mortified, and I never repeated the experiment.Memoir, p. xxxv.

Looking back upon the strength of the illusion which seemed to possess him, and his unwilling

ness to believe it a dream, we may feel that in

these lay whatever danger there might be in yield

a

ing to such fancies. Most children, as we have said, have region of their own to expatiate in; but the healthy, vigorous mind, knows when it is indulging in illusions, and likes them because they are illusions over which it has unlimited power and mastery, which it can take up and lay down at will. It is best too, we believe, for this region of fancy to be a secret possession-a treasure held within the inmost mind, which bashfulness, and, indeed, the absence of all temptation to seek a confidant, must keep forever closed from the outer

in the tragedy were written by Mr. Coleridge senior!" He called this nation the "Ejuxrii;" and one day, when walking very pensively, I asked him what ailed him, he said, "My people are too fond of war, and I have just made an eloquent speech to the senate, which has not made any impression on them, and to war they will go." -Memoir, p. 33.

His seriousness, amusing as it must have been at the time, and contrasting him favorably, to ordinary observers, from the common run of children, had no doubt to do with the unreal, unpractical part of his character; he seemed not to be able to As we

distinguish between reality and pretence.

have said, children should know the ground they

tread on; fancy should be fancy, play should be

play with them as with their elders. In the common sense of the word, his brother says he never played. At first sight, it is remarkable that this should be said emphatically of the man who in after

life never worked, i. e., never steadily pursued or carried through any undertaking. But any one who watches children at play will understand how the practical element of the character is developed in it. Every thought is there acted upon and worked out. It is the very reverse of mere talk and theory. Mimic business in fact the fun lying

world, with something of the same sense of snug in its not being real business is the subject-matter

ness and exclusiveness which made the garden of
the poet seem so charming :-

And what alone did all the rest surpass,
The sweet possession of the fairy place;
Single and conscious to myself alone,

Of pleasures to the excluded world unknown.

Not, of course, but that such things must be according to the natural temperament, and no checking or suppression of fancies from without could avail for the want of that native reserve we are advocating. But to return to this terra incognita:--

of play, and, much more than book-learning-we do not speak of application-trains and qualifies the mind to take its place in life, and do the external work set before it. But why dwell on these thoughts, when there is so little practical to be done? It is hard to make a serious child a merry one, or to persuade a boy into being fond of play who does not by nature like it; he will creep back to his dreams and his books in spite of our wellmeant endeavors; and much more would it be vain and worse than useless to establish in our own

In truth, I was willingly beguiled. His usual mind any rigid standard, the departure from which mode of introducing the subject was, "Derwent," call- shall cast shadows and forebodings over any harming me by my name, (for these disclosures in latter less peculiarity of mind, which it is impossible to years were made to me alone,) " I have had letters and change or reduce to our ideal; but the lesson which papers from Ejuxria;" then came his budget of news, we believe may be learnt from the instance before with appropriate reflections, his words flowing on in us is, to desire for our children a full measure of an exhaustless stream, and his countenance bearing ordinary gifts, rather than more brilliant extraorwitness to the inspiration-shall I call it? by which dinary ones-to cultivate in them the qualities

he was agitated. Nothing could exceed the seriousness of his manner, and doubtless of his feeling. He was, I am persuaded, utterly unconscious of invention; and if the early age in which this power was

exercised be remarkable, the late period to which it was continued was not less so. I have reason to be lieve that he continued the habit mentally from time to time after he left school, and of course had no longer a confidant-in this, as in many other ways, continuing a child. -Memoir, p. 39.

Another witness to this habit of mind is found in the recollections of a still earlier age; recorded

natural to their age, more than others which seem to go beyond them and to be fully satisfied when we see them children in the simplest sense of the word, without longing for premature evidence of intellect. For even taking the lowest groundwhich to a Christian worldly ambition ought to appear-ordinary gifts are more important to the formation of a great character than extraordinary; a man to be great must possess all the qualities in full development of our common nature-there must be this foundation of brotherhood and sym

by Mrs. Basil Montagu, who says in a letter of pathy with universal man, on which superadd as

recent date :

He was a most extraordinary child, exhibiting at six years old the most surprising talent for invention. At eight years of age he had found a spot upon the globe which he peopled with an imaginary nation,

gave them a name, a language, laws, and a senate, where he framed long speeches, which he translated, he said, for my benefit, and for the benefit of my neighbors, who climbed the garden wall to listen to this surprising child, whom they supposed to be reciting pieces from memory. About this time he wrote a tragedy, and, being at a loss in winding up the catas

many peculiar powers as you please. But universal qualities are the wood and stone of the human temple; they must be reared symmetrically, before the painting and sculpture, the gold and gems, can be seen as they ought to be, and without these fitly joined together we can make no harmonious display of our fine things; while the solid structure of ordinary humanity we have pictured is comparatively independent of its costly decorations, and may form a very fine building without them. All are ready to grant this when men have reached maturity; but children are estimated, and perhaps